Great Content: 5 Rules for Delighting Your Audience

If you can believe it, humans now have an attention span of eight seconds, according to study published earlier this year by Microsoft. This is officially shorter than the attention span of a goldfish (9 seconds), and we have smartphones to thank for our new shortcoming, according to The Telegraph. For marketers, this means that there is a very small window of opportunity to ensure that content packs a punch.

Whether you’re promoting a webinar, video or white paper, you better make sure that it gets to the point and grabs your audience’s attention at lightning speed. Here are five rules to make sure your prospects don’t stray from the content your marketing team works hard to develop.

1. Make It Memorable.
Experiences are more memorable than actual content, whether it be text on a landing page or an educational sales video, according to Content Marketing World. You should always strive to create content that makes your audience think. If your prospects interact with content on a deeper level, there is a greater chance that they will remember your company in the future.

2. Focus on Telling Your Story.
Regardless of your target audience, people generally resonate with marketing tactics that touch them on a personal level. Taking advantage of opportunities to talk about your company story through content can seize the attention of your buyers. Once you embed your relatable stories into content, you can go one step further by sharing these assets through channels, such as your blog or social media profiles.

3. Be Honest About Your Content.
Evaluating your content before you send it out to the masses is a must. You should be able to confidently take a step back and ask yourself, “Would I be interested in this?” If you find your marketing assets underwhelming, there is a good chance that your audience will view the same way. However, recognizing the problem sooner rather than later can give your marketing team an opportunity to identify content issues and revamp its strategy.

4. Make Your Content Helpful.
When marketers present an article to a prospect, he or she only reads about 60 percent of it. This may be disheartening for most content marketers to read, but it doesn’t have to be this way, even if you find engagement to be your biggest challenge. The key to resonating with your target audience might be to think about their needs. How could your content help them make purchase decisions? On a more basic level, how could content apply to their everyday lives? If your prospects find answers in your videos, white papers and infographics, you can bet they’ll go back to reference these assets in the future.

5. Cut Out the Lingo.
Marketers in technical industries may find it easier to relate to customers with business lingo, but this isn’t always the best route. In fact, eliminating the “industry jargon” may be more appealing to consumers who want an easily digestible piece of content. This doesn’t mean you should eliminate helpful information or facts from your consumer-facing assets – just relax when it comes to the technical terminology. Your target audience shouldn’t feel as if reading your content is a lengthy, daunting task.

About 70 percent of organizations that create marketing content are developing more than they did one year ago, according to Content Marketing Institute. However, none of it matters if it doesn’t hit home with the target audience. There’s no better time than the present to evaluate your content marketing strategy than now.

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